tbmoore: I've never bothered with emacs and
elisp. Isn't the lack of closures in elisp obnoxious?

BTW, I'm one of the few proud owners of a copy of "On Lisp",
one of the best computer science books ever. The fascinating
thing is that Paul Graham wrote Yahoo Shopper in Common Lisp
and made millions doing it. In LISP!

I've been thinking about Lisp a lot recently.

I think Lisp could use a few small extensions. One would be
to make CONS sub-classable. This would help, for example,
with XML, kinda like Perl 6's [vapourware] per-scalar,
per-symbol
property values, but I also see much value in writing a
compiler: code analysis information could be stored in new
fields in the conses of an s-expression without modifying
the form of the expression. Such an extension would also
require an extension to dot notation so extended conses
could be printed and read.

Another extension that would be nice is what I think of as
"forward closures", much like Pascal or GCC local functions,
which are closures that are defined only as long as the
parent function instance does not exit. There is a safety
issue with such forward values, of course, but the value of
forward closures is that it can make continuation passing
style code more efficient by not requiring heap storage for
captured variables. And this (CPS) is needed to implement
logic programming languages like Prolog or Icon. And I would
really like to be able to program in Lisp with Icon
semantics.

But this is all kinda academic... I'm not working on that
sort of stuff...